We now can create critical cell types like cardiomyocytes etc. from stem cells. Additionally, we are learning the rules of using these cells to rebuild tissues. A major gap in our knowledge relates to the immunobiology of these cells. Lessons from transplantation medicine are only partially applicable, because solid organs are more complex and likely more immunogenic than defined cell populations.
How does the immune
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We now can generate large quantities of critical cell types whose deficiencies underlie many chronic diseases like heart failure. This breakthrough brings us to the next-level impediment: the immune system. While induced pluripotent stem cells have the potential to obviate rejection, in practical terms this is cost-prohibitive: It will cost huge amounts of money to produce and qualify a single patient's cell dose. Moreover, human cardiomyocytes are potent when given to infarcted hearts in the acute or sub-acute phase of infarction, but they have no benefit with chronic heart failure. The 6 months required to produce iPSC-cardiomyocytes precludes their autologous use for myocardial infarction.

We need an off the shelf cell therapy product for myocardial infarction that can be mass produced and qualified for large numbers of patients. This means an allogeneic product is necessary. Identifying the immune response to cardiomyocytes or other cell products will teach us how to precisely immunosuppress the patient, thereby minimizing complications, or alternatively, how to engineer the cells so as to avoid immunogenicity in the first place.

Lessons from the study of cardiomyocyte transplantation could extend to dopamine neurons, pancreatic beta-cells, retinal cells, myelinating cells and many other areas that cause common chronic disease.

Feasibility and challenges of addressing this CQ or CC:

We know a great deal of transplant immunology from hematopoietic stem cell transplantation (graft versus host) and from solid organ transplantation (host versus graft). There are good mouse and large animal (including non-human primate) models of stem cell differentiation and organ transplantation. This offers low hanging fruit where, in perhaps 5 years, we could discern the critical similarities and differences between transplanting stem cell derivatives and organ or marrow transplantation. These studies will inform clinical trials of allogeneic human stem cell derivatives that will be underway by then.

Success in this area will require bringing together researchers interested in stem cell biology and transplant immunology. A properly resourced RFA from NIH could be just the thing needed to promote this interaction.

Name of idea submitter and other team members who worked on this idea:
Charles Murry, MD, PhD

Will advance cell and gene based therapeutics for cardiac repair. Despite promise, efficacy of cell based therapies remains largely unproven and this may in part be due to poor understanding of cell-ECM interactions. Research efforts in engineering cardiac ECM have the potential to greatly advance such therapeutic approaches.

Feasibility and challenges of addressing this CQ or CC:

This research field is ripe for experimentation and testing.

A major thrust of recent efforts in repairing cardiac injury has focused on cell therapies. However, since the ECM provides the necessary scaffold for the cells it is important to consider the cell-ECM interactions when utilizing these approaches.

Will require multi-disciplinary expertise.

Name of idea submitter and other team members who worked on this idea:
NHLBI Staff

Voting

What are the best inroads for the NHLBI to support innovative approaches in the next 5-10 years, especially blood cell therapies based on hematopoietic stem cell and novel gene therapy approaches to control or even cure HIV infection?

HIV control or possibly even HIV cure could result from developing novel cell therapies, especially hematopoietic stem cell (HSC) transplants, and might also result from early use of antiretroviral therapy in acutely HIV-infected individuals.

• Transplantation of HSC including engineered cells has the potential to eradicate HIV reservoirs for HIV cure: the Berlin patient treated with HSC transplant remains free of HIV and is still the only patient cured of HIV infection as of today;

• Identification of acute HIV infections through routine blood donor screening and early anti-retroviral therapy for identified HIV-infected donors can limit or even prevent the establishment of HIV reservoirs.

Feasibility and challenges of addressing this CQ or CC:

• The Berlin patient has provided the proof of concept that HIV infection can be eradicated, that is, sterilizing cure can be achieved, through HSC transplantation in combination with other therapies;

• Recent studies have shown that early identification of HIV infection and treatment of infected individuals with anti-retroviral therapy as soon as possible can significantly limit the size of the HIV reservoirs even if such early treatment may not be able to completely prevent the establishment of HIV reservoirs; routine blood donor screening for both anti-HIV antibodies and HIV RNA among blood donors offers unique opportunities to identify acute HIV infections.

For HIV cure, the challenges include:

• Generation of HIV-resistant HSCs in adequate quantity for transplantation;

• Efficiency of homing and expansion of HIV-resistant HSC transplants;

• Efficiency in replacing HIV-infected cells, including CD4+ resting cells as the major HIV reservoirs, with HIV-resistant HSCs following transplantation;

A major advance in this area will increase the number of donor lungs available for lung transplantation

Feasibility and challenges of addressing this CQ or CC:

A number of stem and progenitor cells involved in lung repair and regeneration have been identified. Targeting them for expansions in damaged donor lungs may turn these damaged lungs into healthier lungs that can then be used for lung transplant safely.

Most of the donor lungs are not suitable for lung transplantation because the premorbid conditions of the donors often also damaged the lungs. Bioreactors have been used to “rehab” these damaged lungs and optimizing the ex vivo condition in these bioreactors may accelerate the lung repair process.

Name of idea submitter and other team members who worked on this idea:
NHLBI Staff

Voting

Current stem cell based approaches to translational medicine predominantly show modest efficacy. Most research rest on accepting existing limitations and focusing upon "tweaks" to the experimental model rather than taking on important barriers head on. The efficacy of stem cell-based regenerative medicine will never be fully realized unless we stop trying overly simplistic approaches such as"more is better" and start
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The field of regenerative medicine holds great potential but we risk losing the public trust by hyperbolic promises, modest efficacy, and incremental research steps. Truly innovative research will transform the landscape and offer truly novel therapeutic approaches to many current incurable conditions. The result is a dramatic shift in the practice of medicine, new options for treatment, enhanced engagement of the public in biomedical research and new growth opportunities for the NIH and biotech sectors.

Feasibility and challenges of addressing this CQ or CC:

The future is here for regenerative medicine, but for the most part the potential and practice has been unrealized or poorly executed. The challenge is to identify the limiting factors and sweep them aside. There is broad and surprisingly consistent consensus on what the barriers are to successful regenerative therapy, but it seems most researchers are complacent and accept these limitations as inherent in the system rather than try to find truly combative approaches to overcome the barriers to enhancing regenerative processes. So it is essential to change the current mindset and push for a full frontal attack on the barriers that impede successful regeneration rather than minor modifications or uninspired brute force approaches that ignore the underlying mechanistic issues. Also, a major challenge is the hyperbole and overselling of research findings and impact by researchers and their institutions looking to capitalize upon the "discovery de jour." Such overly optimistic and unrealistic promises undermine our position in the public eye and compromise our future ability to earn the public trust.

Name of idea submitter and other team members who worked on this idea:
M Sussman

Voting

Do modifications in the recipient gut or lung microbiome affect development of tolerance and immunologic recovery after allogeneic hematopoietic stem cell transplantation (HCT) and can re-institution of a more normal microbiome lead to improved outcomes?

HCT leads to profound changes in the host microbiome. Some small studies indicate that differential recovery of the gut microbiome is associated with differential outcomes, including graft-versus-host disease and mortality. Less is known about the pulmonary microbiome. Better understanding of the role of the microbiome in facilitating posttransplant recovery could lead to easily administered interventions and provide important insights into the role of different subpopulations of the microbiome on the health of all people.

Feasibility and challenges of addressing this CQ or CC:

Preclinical and clinical studies of this area would be greatly facilitated by a microbiome repository linked to high quality clinical data and would provide opportunity for insight into the role of the microbiome in health and disease.

Name of idea submitter and other team members who worked on this idea:
Mary Horowitz

Voting

Graft versus host disease (GVHD) remains the most significant complication of allogeneic hematopoietic stem cell transplantation (HCT). While the use of HCT has grown significantly safer and has demonstrated broad efficacy in the setting of a broad range of blood diseases, immunosuppressive therapy has not dramatically evolved since the introduction of calcineurin inhibitor-based approaches decades ago. The availability
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GVHD remains a critical problem and major barrier to the more widespread utilization of HCT, especially for nonmalignant diseases, where tolerance of treatment-related mortality is understandably low.

There is a compelling need for novel immunosuppressive agents that can effectively limit alloreactivity mediated by donor T and B cells, while relatively sparing pathogen-specific T cells, including those mediating antiviral T cell responses important in the post-HCT interval.

In the past decade, drug development has facilitated the introduction into preclinical and clinical trials of a broad range of agents that in addition to targeting pathways of interest in target cells (e.g., aberrant signaling in cancer cells) may also effectively inhibit T and/or B cell responses. Examples include hypomethylating agents (e.g., azacitidine), HDAC inhibitors (e.g., vorinostat), MEK inhibitors (e.g., trametinib) and BTK inhibitors (e.g., ibrutinib). Each of these classes of agents has been demonstrated in preclinical and/or clinical studies to also limit alloreactive T cells, and/or augment regulatory T cell responses, leading to a net reduction of alloreactivity. Unlike traditional agents (e.g., the calcineurin inhibitors) these agents appear to be more selective, and in some cases may have dual benefit in reducing relapse.

The NHLBI can facilitate the identification and translation to clinical practice in the setting of HCT trials of novel immunosuppressive agents.

Feasibility and challenges of addressing this CQ or CC:

Research funding targeted to improving the pipeline of novel immunosuppressive agents could have immediate and dramatic impact in the field of HCT, especially impacting its application for nonmalignant diseases. Patients lacking optimal registry donors, especially those from underrepresented minority groups, will particularly benefit from improvements in immunosuppression, as patients receiving less than optimally matched donors are at much higher risk of GVHD.

The NHLBI can encourage and facilitate research that tests compounds that have already passed through the drug development process, but in many cases were not intended to function as immunosuppressive agents. Compelling preclinical studies have suggested that targeted inhibition of T and B cells, and/or epigenetic modifiers can lessen alloreactivity while preserving beneficial cellular immune responses and facilitating immune reconstitution.

It will be far easier to appropriate therapeutic agents already developed for another purpose than to do novel drug development from scratch. In many cases, preclinical studies have highlighted the therapeutic potential in immunosuppression for agents that have been developed to treat malignancies, but yielded suboptimal success. Research that encourages the development of these drugs as part of a combined immunosuppressive/immunomodulation approach may rescue such compounds, while yielding potential dramatic advances in clinical HCT.

Name of idea submitter and other team members who worked on this idea:
Krishna Komanduri, M.D.

Voting

Advances in the care of pediatric patients with sickle cell disease ( SCD) have resulted in improved survival to adulthood.However, adulthood is marked by rapid disease progression, impaired quality of life and premature mortality. Hematopoietic cell transplantation(HCT) from matched sibling donor has curative potential, but has been offered mainly to children. Refinements in the conditioning regimen, supportive care,
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To overcome this obstacle to progress in the field, we propose the creation of the funding mechanisms for a multicenter clinical trial consortium which would bring together investigators in field and facilitate study the outcomes of CT for patients with different types of donors and stem cell sources and compare them to outcomes in phenotypically matched controls receiving best available standard of care.Answering the compelling question about the role of CT in the management of SCD has the potential to have a catalytic effect in progress in this field. Patients are are then more likely to receive CT or standard of care at the appropriate time and in the manner in which they are most likely to have a positive outcome. This has the potential to reduce morbidity and premature mortality and in the long run, to decrease the burden of the disease on the healthcare system. The advent of clinical trials of gene therapies for SCD offers the prospect of even greater applicability of curative therapies. Thus, a consortium developed to answer this CQ would serve as a crucial vehicle for providing access to a greater proportion of patient to these personalized curative therapies . Such studies would also be powered to answer the question about who should receive the curative therapy, when they should receive it, and how it would impact their SCD related complications, late effects, survival and quality of life and help families make informed choice appropriate for their situation.

Feasibility and challenges of addressing this CQ or CC:

The increasing applicability and acceptability of HCT for SCD is evidenced by the doubling in the number of such procedures reported to CIBMTR in the decade starting 2001. Refinements in conditioning regimen and supportive care continue to improve outcomes in children and now in adults with SCD undergoing HCT from HLA matched related donors. Recently, HCT from unrelated donors and from haplo-identical donors have further increased the applicability of HCT. Opening of gene therapy trials has further raised the prospect of cure for a greater proportion of patients. These developments are evidence of the feasibility of recruitment to large multi-center comparative trials of SCD and standard of care. Recently, there has been increasing collaboration among investigators in the field with informal consortia being developed by investigators coming together to study HCT for children, adults or HCT from haplo-identical donors. These groups are also increasingly working with SCD hematologists, families and other stakeholders. There is also increasing cross-cutting collaborations with other medical specialists and behavioral and translational scientists Thus, the convergence of several factors described above suggests that the time is fortuitous for a major initiative from the NHLBI to bring investigators together and create the infrastructure that will enable these investigators to seek definitive answers to the challenging question “What is the place of curative therapy in SCD?”.

Name of idea submitter and other team members who worked on this idea:
Lakshmanan Krishnamurti, MD, Allistair Abraham MD, John Horan MD and members of the Sickle cell Transplantation and Research Alliance

Voting

to date, the existing markets lack a clinically-suitable human cardiomyocyte source with adequate myocardium regenerative potential, which has been the major setback in developing safe and effective cell-based therapies for regenerating the damaged human heart in cardiovascular disease.

Given the limited capacity of the heart for self-repair or renewal, cell-based therapy represents a promising therapeutic approach closest to provide a cure to restore normal heart tissue and function for CVD. There is no evidence that adult stem/precursor/progenitor cells derived from mature tissues, such as bone marrow, cord blood, umbilical cord, mesenchymal stem cells, patients’ heart tissue, placenta, or fat tissue, are able to give rise to the contractile heart muscle cells following transplantation into the heart. Despite numerous reports about cell populations expressing stem/precursor/progenitor cell markers identified in the adult hearts, the minuscule quantities and growing evidences indicating that they are not genuine heart cells and that they give rise predominantly to non-functional smooth muscle cells rather than functional contractile cardiomyocytes have caused skepticism if they can potentially be harnessed for cardiac repair. In recent years, reprogrammed or trans-differentiated adult cells, as a result of being backed by excess sum of government and private funding, have been rekindled as the adult alternates. However, major drawbacks such as abnormal gene expression, accelerated aging, immune rejection, not graftable, and extremely low efficiencies, have severely impaired the utility of reprogrammed or trans-differentiated somatic cells as viable therapeutic approaches.

Feasibility and challenges of addressing this CQ or CC:

Opportunity: Derivation of pluripotent human embryonic stem cells (hESCs) from the IVF leftover embryos has brought a new era of cellular medicine for the heart. The intrinsic ability of a hESC for both unlimited self-renewal and differentiation into clinically-relevant lineages makes it a practically inexhaustible source of replacement cells for human tissue and function restoration. Therefore, it has been regarded as an ideal source to provide a large supply of functional human cells to heal the damaged or lost tissues that have naturally limited capacity for renewal, such as the human heart and the human brain. Although a vast sum of NHLBI funding has been spent on looking for adult alternates, such as reprogramming and trans-differentiation of fibroblasts or mature tissues, so far, only human cardiac stem/precursor/progenitor cells derived from embryo-originated hESCs have shown such cellular pharmacologic utility and capacity adequate for myocardium regeneration in pharmaceutical development of stem cell therapy for the damaged human heart.

Name of idea submitter and other team members who worked on this idea:
Xuejun Parsons

Voting

There is an increasing number of blood cancer survivors in the United States. Many of them have treatment induced heart and lung comorbidities (i.e CHF, pulmonary fibrosis, early aging, etc). However, there does not seem to be a concerted effort by the NHLBI to leverage their relationship with the NCI or the BMT CTN to address this issue. NHLBI should be developing a funding mechanism for cardiopulmonary researchers to
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HCT is associated with high rates of morbidity and mortality from transplant-related complications, the reduction of which would lead to higher transplant-mediated cure rates for life-threatening benign and malignant hematologic disorders. Comorbidity and patient-reported functional status impairment are known to increase the risk for transplant-related mortality, but unlike comorbidity, cardiorespiratory fitness is potentially modifiable. The optimal way to improve fitness through pre-transplant exercise and lifestyle interventions is not known, however, and understanding how to affect through a short term intervention would also benefit other cancer and non-cancer health conditions in which future treatment is intensive and associated with significant risk.

Feasibility and challenges of addressing this CQ or CC:

Feasibility and Challenges of Addressing the CG or CC:

Understanding how to improve cardiorespiratory fitness in a short period of time will require a research agenda that addresses the following challenges: how to measure cardiorespiratory fitness in a generalized and scalable way, which may or may not require maximal exercise testing for all participants; how to design intensive exercise interventions that are at least partially home-based in order to minimize resource burden on patients and centers; and how to personalize intervention delivery and testing in a way that is tailored to the baseline fitness levels and capabilities of each participant. Meeting these challenges will enable large-scale, personalized exercise testing and intervention delivery in other non-transplant populations.

Name of idea submitter and other team members who worked on this idea:
Thomas Shea and William Wood

To extend our knowledge of the pathobiology of heart, lung, blood, and sleep disorders and enable clinical investigations that advance the prediction, prevention, preemption, treatment, and cures of human disease.